Google Makes GitHub Easier to Navigate for Developers

By Todd R. Weiss |
Posted 2014-01-14

Google's GitHub developer community has been helpful for developers to collaborate and innovate since the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) moved to the platform in January 2013, but as it has grown, it's become harder to find projects and keep organized.

To fix those problems, Google has added a new, streamlined and image-based landing page to make the community easier to navigate, according to a Jan. 13 post by Julia Ferraioli, a developer advocate with the GCP, on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.

"Almost one year ago, Google Cloud Platform launched our GitHub organization, with repositories ranging from tutorials to samples to utilities," wrote Ferraioli. "This is where developers could find all resources relating to the platform, and get started developing quickly. We started with 36 repositories, with lofty plans to add more over time in response to requests from you, our developers. Many product releases, feature launches, and one logo redesign later, we are now up to 123 repositories illustrating how to use all parts of our platform."

As positive as that growth has been, it also has a downside, wrote Ferraioli. "Despite some clever naming schemes, it was becoming difficult to find exactly the code that you wanted amongst all of our repositories. Idly browsing through over 100 options wasn't productive. The repository names gave you an idea of what stacks they used, but not what problems they solved."

That's where the new landing page and redesign comes into play, she wrote. "Today, we are making it easier to browse our repositories and search for sample code with our landing page at googlecloudplatform.github.io. Whether you want to find all Compute Engine resources, locate all samples that are available in your particular stack, or find examples that fit your particular area of interest, you can find it with the new GitHub page."

The new landing page is organized using interactive boxes describing the listed projects, as well as search filters to make it easier for developers to find what they are looking for in the community. Projects can also be sorted by a "featured" list or by technologies, including App Engine, Cloud Storage, Endpoints, Datastore or BigQuery.

The move to GitHub for the GCP last January was done to make it easier for software developers to contribute and continue the evolution of the cloud platform. The GitHub community is where interested developers can find code samples and tools relating to App Engine, BigQuery, Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and more.

GitHub is a rapidly growing collaborative software development platform and the leader in public and private code sharing and hosting. It's a Web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub offers both paid plans for private repositories, and free accounts for open-source projects. GitHub has more than 4 million users and 10 million Git repositories.

Google is always busy making improvements and advances in its cloud platform components and services for developers.

In November 2013, Google began efforts to help game developers capture the growing market of mobile games by harnessing the power of the GCP to expand their games to more users. To show game developers more details about the platform and how it can help them with their mobile games, Google created two sample open-source games as well as a technical paper and reference architecture to provide a road map for developers who want to explore using the cloud platform.

In late October 2013, Google replaced its old Google API Console with a new, expanded and redesigned Google Cloud Console to help developers organize and use the more than 60 APIs now offered by Google. The new Google Cloud Console makes managing the over 60 Google APIs housed within easier than ever, according to Google. Soon the new cloud console will be set as the default choice for the console by Google, though users will have the ability to revert back to the old version.

In September 2013, Google unveiled an update of the Google App Engine, with the latest release 1.8.4 including a host of features that the company says will make it more flexible and simpler for developers to use for their applications. Included in 1.8.4 is support for Dynamic Web Projects in Eclipse to better support Google Cloud Endpoints and App Engine Backends, as well as fixes for several bugs. One other important new feature is the ability of Google App Engine to handle differential snapshots of a Google Compute Engine persistent disk so that only the most recently changed data is updated.

Editor's Note: This story was updated with GitHub's latest user statistics.